One morning lying in bed still half awake, my mind started preparing to get up and go feed a friend’s cats. As I roused from sleep, my conscious mind engaged and reminded me that my petsitting date was two weeks in the future, not today.
Momentarily half of myself was in the future and half of myself was in the present. It was an odd sensation – a bit jarring and confusing for my human body and brain to make sense of. I sat up and shook my head, which brought me completely into the here and now.
As I pondered what had happened, I realized that in dreamtime I had traveled through the veil into the future and hadn’t made it fully back into my body from that other timeline before waking up. I smiled and was briefly curious what else had happened in that alternate reality, then went about my day rooted in the physical.
Time is a construct of the physical world. Here on Planet Earth, we follow chronological, linear time – past, present, and future. We also believe in causal time – if A happens and B happens, then C results.
In the spirit realms, all time exists at once, a concept known as circular time. In shamanic journeys, we can travel back along our timeline and do healing work for our younger self and feel the effects in our current life. We can even visit our future self to get a preview of the wisdom we’ve learned around something we haven’t experienced yet.
Circular time also helps us understand ancestral healing. If we journey back into our family history and do healing for the ancestor who experienced the original wound, the benefit and blessing of that work ripples out to the ancestors, the current generations, and the generations yet to come.
Time here in the physical world is also elastic. We’ve all experienced that. When we’re doing something we enjoy like a favorite hobby or having dinner with a dear friend, time passes quickly. When we’re doing something not as fun, like having dental work or waiting on hold with the credit card company, time creeps by slowly.
It’s also possible to step out of time completely. For me this happens when I walk in nature. The combination of movement, being outdoors, and the grounded connection to Mother Earth helps me relax in a way that time ceases to exist. I’m so deeply present that I’m transported into a place without time. I’ll get back to my car after an especially satisfying hike and be surprised that only two hours have elapsed when it felt like an entire morning.
Certain activities like meditating, communing with nature, doing ceremony, being creative, and journeying help us to step out of time because we leave behind the linear world and enter the imaginal realms. We leave behind the ordinary and embrace the magic of the spiritual.
This work is real, and it matters.
October 25, 2021